Pareidolia
by Nnatsukashii
Summary: In the summer of 1986, Kanda Yu, an art student currently caring for his ill father, finds a boy and a small lion cub in his barn. Things quickly turn sour, however, Allen's escape not going unnoticed and the high-tech prosthetic arm he's taken with him brings about dangers Kanda does not know how to protect them from. Yullen, AU
1. In a Roll and Rush

**Pareidolia**

Chapter 1

Kanda submits to weary eyes and the midnight timber of crickets and toads and the rustling of trees hampers all hopes of working until the early hours of the morning. His pen is put down so that his charcoal and paint stained fingers may shift through his hair as it falls out of his bind and around his shoulders, slanted cobalt eyes sliding shut, and for once a sigh of tired relief leaves his parting lips.

Numb legs uncurl from their cramped fold in his chair and he stands tall, hands stretched high above his head, a small slip of belly between the hem of his oriental pants and loose shirt revealed to the summer's stuffed warmth. Kanda makes to wobble over to and toss himself into bed, a slim mattress and nest of thin blankets strewn in and around it on the wood floor. Only before he can, just by chance, he catches sight of a light shining through a high barn window across one of the many small fields that surround the house.

With a lingering swipe across his craggy chin, Kanda instead slips out of the room with a withering sigh and creaking floorboards left in his wake. A moment later he leaves the house in a pair of boots snatched from the mudroom and a dimming flashlight from a kitchen drawer, and makes his way through the barn as he stifles yawns and catches himself between small slips in the mud.

Upon entering the large barn doors, a cacophony of farm animal babble rises Kanda into idle annoyance, even more so as it continues through his still and silent stance between their isles. His dimming flashlight is tucked into the hem of his loose pants and he swiftly makes his way up the ladder and into the hayloft, its window being where the soft light had shone through moments before.

Once reaching the top, Kanda, sleepily oblivious to the potential threat of an intruder, spots a lone, lit kerosine lamp beside bales of hay. Assuming it had been the mistake of one of the younger farm hands (one of the few Tiedoll had kept), Kanda bristles but makes to collect it with an easy saunter until a scurry, slip and thump against the floorboards of the loft startles and finally wakes him.

Despite the low glow of the lamp, the rounding tingle beneath his skin downplays the dangers of a stranger and he begins to suspect an animal; not the first or unexpected in an old house so far out in the countryside, but when he nears the loose nests of hay in cautious steps, the white tufts of hair escaping their cache among the hay and stunned blue-gray eyes that stare back into his own slanted cobalt belong to no animal.

In a flash of soiled, pale skin, the boy scurries to a far wall of the barn in a roll and rush, with his small, starved chest heaving in exertion and fear.

"Hey - _hey _-" Kanda's startled voice rings out among the fading calls of distressed animals, and with the following crumple and distraught sob that rips away from behind the boy's hand, Kanda is floored.

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	2. Chapter 2

**Pareidolia**

Chapter 2

Cold pinches and coddles Allen's bare, damp skin as he dresses out of soaked clothes and into a warmer set, its fingers the grip of an old friend he does not favor coming and going in small, mistrusted greetings. He slips into underwear with the slowness that comes with numbed fear and an enveloped chill, faring no better when one arm must do the work of two.

He hurries to hide in frayed jeans, a t-shirt too large for his thinning body, a coat once black and trimmed with red, its strings of gold sewn into the hem for safe keeping, and a knitted, fraying cap pulled to his brows to keep away his hair and wound from scared eyes.

At his feet a small golden cub mewls tiredly, and Allen bends to cradle him as well as he can. With some fumbled trouble, he manages to tie the ends of the scrap of blanket he's been tucked into so that he may sling it over his head and beneath his right arm, Timcampy kept within the makeshift bundle at his chest. Allen liters him with useless kisses to quell his cries, not knowing if it's hunger, fatigue, or the same jittery fear keeping them both shaken that makes him so noisily upset.

Hands cupped to Timcampy's belly on the other side of the cloth, Allen slips into his boots and slings over the other shoulder a duffle bag he handles gingerly. As he steps out of the restroom on the station's platform, he pats its outer pockets in search of the ticket he's nicked from an unfortunate passenger and tucks it beneath the hem of his hat, keeping his torn face angled away from the scattered groups gathered at the other end of the station.

Hiding the newly acquired tear on his forehead, eye and cheek has not been difficult in his panicked scatter across fields to the rural station, though he still feels the grip of his father's hands on his face and throat, the heat and panic that comes with his only known home burning to the ground. Tears spring to his eyes as the unconscious grinding if his teeth pulls apart the childish mess of small, reddening bandages across his cheek, and he quickly stills his face and jounces Timcampy in his hand to settle them both, staring into the line of trees across the tracks.

Allen faintly imagines the far off whine of an ambulance, but dismisses it and the images he has run away from, instead digging for his voice to hum for both himself and his companion. In a moment, however, without any warning, Allen is jarred, eyes sprung open in a deafening burst of panic, and he is tugged to the ground in the next.

After the startling pull to his bag Allen finds himself on the platform, the end of his missing arm colliding with it and sending incredible shocks into his shoulders as surprise steals way his breath in a floundering gasp. With struggling wheezes he's on his feet, blood pounding in his ears and roar into the breezy summer night, rumbling in his throat as his legs pump like pistons. Timcampy is deposited safely onto the ground with the work of nimble fingers and swift knees as Allen charges toward the figure ahead of him.

Using his one arm and quick coil of his legs, Allen brings him down and immediately the scuffle begins, the boy beneath him squirming in the strength of his legs and fingers fumbling for the bag that has fallen within a few feet of their heaped struggle. Allen besets him with an unrelenting fist to the face and neck as a string of angry, stitched together slurs leaves his lips in indistinguishable, crackling yells. The stranger's - a boy larger than Allen and only a year or two older - upper arms are pinned to the gravel by Allen's bony knees, until a surprising blow of sharp pain erupts in his lower back, and the force behind his punches staggers.

Allen's sudden, ardent fear throbs in his throat as the two boys pause their hardscrabble, one surprised by what he has done and the other by what has been done to him. He huffs a few heavy breaths as he reaches behind him and wraps a shaky hand around the other's, the figure below him nonplussed and frozen. His silver brows furrow, eyes shut closed and lips stretch their entire length as he tugs at the intruding pain in his body. Again he's strained the tear running down his face, though its sting falls distant against the shiv in his back, and the blood runs unnoticed down and beneath his chin.

The moment the shiv gives, Allen is jostled to the ground as his attacker attempts to wriggle out from beneath him in a panic-heavy twist of his free hips, and gets not nearly as gracefully on his feet as Allen had been just before. He reaches for the strewn duffle bag fallen by the tracks, and even through the sting of his cheek and thick pain in his back, Allen struggles to stand and runs after him once more. Every foot-fall rattles his teeth in his skull and sends a slowly dulling throb through his new wound as its viscous, flowing blood sticks his powder-blue shirt to his back.

Once more they come down together, this time without a roar reverberating through his chest, and Allen's arm around the boy's torso in one last tight hold. Between their tangled bodies in the gravel comes a sudden gasp, sharp and unbelieving. They share a moment of eye contact, Allen's too-gray eyes wide and bright with adrenaline as he stares into the startled brown pair beneath him. His hand trembles in his grip around the same shiv that was thrust into his back, now pierced deeply through the stranger's heart. He looks to his bloodied hands in surprise, the knife through the boy's coat, his chest, and then back to his contracted pupils in time to see the life fade from them, the reflection of his torn face and the murky June sky above him too clear.

The train arrives while Allen is still looking into the boy's face, and he watches its steady pace down the tracks toward him dumbly with his hands at his sides until its whistle startles a few moments of sense into him. He quickly abandons the boy, the knife, and fetches the duffle bag, turning to call the cub still strewn by the station platform.

"Tim!" The train is only a few yards away, and the scrap of cloth tousles. "Tim, _please_, let's go!"

Allen clumsily hops over the tracks and disappears into the line of trees the moment he catches a glance of gold peek through the torn bed sheet, trusting the cub to catch up to him.

. . .

Marcid and bleeding, Allen leans heavily on a skinny, pealing birch among hundreds surrounding him, matutine summer fog obscuring anything beyond just a few yards on all sides. At his side, Timcampy pads nervously on his short legs and kneads at Allen's thigh, curiously noses his coat and licks away at the blood. He lifts the cub onto his lap and presses his nose into spotted, woolly fur, breathes in the earthy smell of his skin, and Allen very slowly begins to cry.

"I didn't mean to do it." Timcampy begins to whimper in the way needy, hungry cubs tend to do, though the boy is no mother, and has no milk for either of their empty bellies. "I swear I didn't mean to, it just happened so fast, and before I –"

Allen chokes and hugs his lion closer to his chest, hiding his pain-numbed face in Tim's stomach as he attempts to grapple him with paws at either side of his head, his wet nose dotting the boy's forehead.

"No, none of this - we need to find somewhere to go, Tim, even if we did miss the train. We need to keep moving." The cub wrings his dry mewl again as Allen jostles him when he stands. "Maybe there's a house close by, alright? If we're lucky, someone will feel sorry enough to give us something to eat."

He stands with Timcampy's belly cradled to his chest as a child would be, and he looks into the light midnight fog ahead of them. "Or maybe they'll be too scared," his voice cracks, he takes a step forward with his pink lips set apart just slightly. "With one look at me, our chances will be gone."

They plod on nonetheless, Timcampy jostled with every weary step and unhappy, Allen holding back heavy tears and a guilty heart. Miles behind them, across fields and dividing copses, their only known home has smothered its last fires, his companions turned to ash, and all collected treasures lost. Allen and Tim, too, were meant to have been caught beneath the fallen tent, as Mana's intentions seemed to be, and though it meant he would be spared the pain of moving on without his only-known happiness, they had escaped with only a change of clothes and a gift Allen knew had been hidden from him the day he'd last seen Cross and nearly lost himself to the fire to recover.

The thought of the redheaded man drains Allen's last ounce of strength and he sags against the doors of the barn he finds looming before them in the fog. They open with a low creak and the two stumble inside.

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**i can almost regrettably say that i'm not going to be continuing this story. **

**i've been excited about writing this for over a year, now, but i just have no idea what i'm doing with something as long and heavy as this, and i'm both too embarrassed and shy to ask anyone for help. maybe sometime down the line i'll add a chapter, or post a separate oneshot spin off since i love this au so much. **

**this really isn't such a big deal, i'm not a very good writer, and i'm afraid this idea wasn't well thought-through from the start, i think. thank you for taking interest in the first place, it literally means the world to me. i'll continue writing for you. **


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